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Tag: Play Music

One of the facts which I had reported to personal friends in recent months, was that I needed to reboot my phone frequently. This led to some puzzlement, because many owners of computers and smart-phones, and tablets, realize that in general, each of these device-categories should be able to run for extended periods of time. Back then, I was rebooting my phone, almost every week.

What I now find, is that I do not need to reboot it as often as I used to, and the reason for this is somewhat obscured, in that I also never really stated, why I needed to reboot it before.

One app I use a lot, is ““. The behavior of this app in the past was, that after having played songs several hundred times, it would just refuse to keep doing so, and would cut out on me, until I did my reboot. My instinctive response to this was to assume, that Android could easily be prone to memory leaks.

But what I seem to have learned, is that some update to this exact app in the past few months, completely fixed this behavior. So this was actually just due to a bug in one app.

The fact has been recorded, that by now I am using Bluetooth Headphones to listen to my walking-around music, instead of cheap ones that just plugged in to the headphone jack. But I also recall, that immediately after making the switch in headphones, this behavior of no longer playing music, did not stop. This behavior continued even after I had switched to the BT Headphones.

But in a related way, I once had a reason to reboot which was not fully related: Power consumption would increase, and grow intolerable. My explanation for this remains, that I have hundreds of apps installed, many of which run in the background, but after a reboot, some of the triggers are not set, that will cause these to do so. Only after several days of normal use, do programs run, which would like for the device to wake up later, so that the same program can run in the background. And so the power consumption will plateau at some level, which I was finding bothersome.

Well it is not likely, that the overall model would have changed, by which Android schedules programs to run in the background. Yet, now that I am walking around with my Bluetooth Headphones, I find that the power consumption is tolerable as well, in spite of not having rebooted for several weeks.

The only explanation I can think of for this second improvement, is that the 16-Ω headphones I was using before, must have been requiring a high drain on the battery in the phone, just to drive the headphones themselves.

OTOH, When I am using my BT Headphones to listen to music constantly, their drivers are being powered by a separate battery, belonging to the headphones themselves. Hence, the actual phone seems to be spared some amount of power drain.

Obviously, my BT Headphones are using Bluetooth 4, which consumes much less power than BT 2 did. But I had not imagined that the improvements would be as dramatic as they have become.

Dirk

Please Note: I would not recommend that people buy Bluetooth Headphones, specifically to listen to music, unless the readers have also assured themselves that their new headphones also use A Suitable CODEC, which allows them to appreciate the music in High Fidelity. Standard BT Heaphones are designed for making phone calls and little else.

(Edit 09/02/2016 : ) I should also add, that before making the switch to my Bluetooth Headphones, I typically had the Bluetooth feature of my phone turned on anyway, to enable it to access my “Vivofit” tracking bracelet. Thus, adding the headphones did not add the need for more chips to be turned on than already were, and both the Vivofit bracelet and my BT Headphones, use Bluetooth 4.